What is VR?

The big news of a couple days ago was the firing up of the Large Hadron Collider (or 'LHC') at CERN. This is awesome to us science-minded folks and should provided for some great advances in physics once they actually start smashing particles together.

But I digress. The actual reason a brought that up was a neat link that came up in my brief research on the subject. It's a set of 360 panoramic photos of the LHC by self-described 'VR Photographer' Peter McCready. An early Quicktime-based implementation of this technology was called QTVR and there is even an International Virtual Reality Photographers Association.

This technology and others like it are very cool, but should they really have the name 'VR' attached to them? Those of us who come from the world of interactive 3d graphics tend to say no, but it seems that the term has been diluted enough that the general public is accepting of all sorts of interpretations.

Sébastien "Cb" Kuntz at A VR Geek Blog has an interesting post on just this topic. He points out that the traditional understanding of what virtual reality is comes down to three things: realtime rendering, interaction, and immersion. Can a panoramic photograph really provide these things? Perhaps interaction (to a degree), but the others are surely not there...

Sébastien comes to the same conclusion that I did years ago when confronted with this same problem. We can't really hope to change the perceptions of the general public when it comes to these peripheral technologies, so we need to change our own vernacular to fit the bill. This why at N Formation Design we use terms like 'immersive', 'semi-immersive', and 'web-based' along with virtual reality to distinuish our own definitions of these technolgies.

Maybe photographer will start calling themselves Panoramic VR Photographers? Probably not :)